He takes you into the front room and soon you're drawn to the familiar photograph above the piano. It was taken this weekend 10 years ago, a group of youngsters about to play in the Ulster minor championship, and unknowingly, about to commence one of the most engaging storylines in football. They've all moved on, in different ways. Paul McGirr was the first, taken from them, just minutes after that photo was snapped. Cormac McAnallen has met his maker too. The captain, Declan McCrossan, packed up county football weeks before Cormac passed away and now is a father for the second time.

'Hub' Hughes, Stephen O'Neill, Brian McGuigan and Ciaran Gourley are all that remain, and of them, only 'Hub' will start against Donegal.

Kids from the special team of '98 have come and gone too.

Like Gavin 'Horse' Devlin, now a father of three. Mention of his name lights up Harte, yet it sparks a tinge of sadness as well. For years at every grade Devlin used to be his rock. In the summer of 2003 Devlin was suspended for three months but once that ban expired, there was never going to be anyone else for centre back against Kerry. Even when Devlin lost his place after being tormented by Alan Brogan in 2005, he continued to personify the innocence of the circle. He constantly offered his successor at number six, Conor Gormley, advice on how to play Eoin Brosnan.

In the lead-up to the All Ireland semi-final, when Harte asked the circle for reasons to beat Armagh, Devlin noted it would be Chris Lawn and Peter Canavan's last game if they didn't. It left him open to a smart quip, which Canavan duly provided . . . "Could be your last too, Horse!" . . . but he still said it.

Devlin never did play championship again. Portlaoise last July was the last time he stood in a Tyrone dressing room.

Last autumn he was invited to trials but he didn't come.

Harte found that sad, yet in a way he was glad.

"I would hate to ever have to tell that lad he was gone. I will always have the height of respect for him. He's a victim of how the game has gone.

Pace is now almost everything and he wasn't blessed with pace. A few years we could afford him in a sweeping role but now teams will have a very constructive, creative player out the field who'll punish you far worse. But if that man [Devlin] had pace, he'd be an All Star every year." He smiles.

"He was the most balanced, eloquent defender you could see. The feet of a dancer."

Sadly, those feet could only move so fast.

His daughters Michaela and Mattie are no longer part of the circle either. They had been there from the start, together, says Harte, pointing to his carpet, "on their knees here, folding out the jerseys and togs and putting them in the right order". It was natural, organic, right, but after Portlaoise, so was the time to leave. Michaela was no longer a child; now she was teaching kids, while Mattie was starting college, with school friends coming onto the team.

Their father has also gone on to other things. Teaching was something he'd enjoyed, to the point his son Mark, as well as Michaela, makes his living from it, but after the 2003 All Ireland, Harte took time out to bring Sam around the county. It was, as he says himself, his "first time away from a bell and a timetable" since he was four, and during that year he met good people and business people and found they weren't exclusive. Martin Shortt, for one, was both a good man and businessman, and when he suggested Harte join his auctioneering and estate agent business, Harte accepted.

Basically he talks to clients who might want land to develop a multiple site, or to builders or land speculators who might have such a site for sale, and it brings him all over Ireland.

So does his capacity to speak. He's spoken to businesses and teams. He's spoken at functions and novenas and retreats. He tells them about the life he leads and the life he doesn't, like watching reality TV. "Reality TV; I mean, what a misnomer! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life.

This thing about sitting, looking at people sleeping. ; what does that do for anybody?

There's far more enriching material out there people should be after." So he tells them about what's enriched him. Like Cormac. Like his own parents, Peter and Mary.

Who they were is who he is, where he's coming from.

Peter was a labourer, with a couple of acres of his own to help feed his nine children; it would have been 10 but wee Veronica died after a couple of weeks, even before her youngest brother, Michael, was born. The first day of every February, Peter would cut the rushes to make St Brigid's Crosses. The Saturday night before every Easter, he'd bring home holy water and go into every room to bless every child of his before they went to bed. And every evening, they'd say the rosary.

Young Michael rarely looked forward to it, and for a few years stopped practising it altogether, but now it's a practice he adheres to daily and a childhood memory he'll cherish forever.

Mary barely left the house yet her influence on her community and her son still touches lives today. "Mummy shared everything she had with everyone else, " Michael Harte smiles softly. "In those days kids would walk three or four miles from school and Mummy would give them bread and butter and syrup to help them on their way. The big thing for me though was how she treated some people who lived on their own and their only other source of contact would be the ceili.

"There was one woman in particular I remember who would tell Mummy her tales of woe. And Mummy would just listen. And by just listening, she was exhibiting every skill counsellors now talk about . . .

empathy, active listening, being non-judgemental . . . skills I use all the time with my players. I heard people tell her the same story five nights in a week and she would listen to them as if was the first time she had ever heard it. Some of these people would be afraid of the dark even, and she'd walk them home.

"That ethos was ingrained into us. To look out for others and see how you can help people rather than how you can take from them. In fact, she had this lovely thing, the lower status someone was perceived to have, the more time she nearly had for them. Travellers would call and Mummy would give them flour or tea or milk, and then when they'd pass by later selling ornaments and pieces, she would buy them even though she never needed them. She felt it was good to be giving. She never preached that to us, but we saw it, and that was the beauty of living in an environment like we did. She just did it. She helped others."

And so, her son tries to do the same. For 25 years now he's been involved in Action MS, a northern charity for those who suffer from multiple sclerosis. A couple of months ago he reversed his opposition to the opening of Croke Park to campaign for an Ireland-Brazil friendly game there to help raise funds for suicide charity Decide. It's why he was at the launch of the Spirit of Paul McGirr charity for Zambia this past week, why he was at the 10th anniversary mass last week ("Some of the boys still go every year, " he notices.

"Stephen O'Neill, Adie Ball, Declan McCrossan, Mark [Harte]."), why he still visits the McAnallen family every month.

Be honest though. You know someone who has said the Hartes are too goody-goody for their own good. Maybe you've said it yourself. Mattie remembers once alright when that charge bugged him.

After the 2005 All Ireland final, his father had broken into tears and leaned onto the shoulder of Brian Dooher at the mention of Cormac and his spirit. "That was for the camera, " someone in school taunted Mattie afterwards.

"Those weren't real tears."

"That hurt me, " says Mattie.

"I didn't like that at all."

His father has a way of looking at it. "People, " he says, "are entitled to think as they do even when they're wrong. It's back to Mummy; don't judge anyone. I've come across a book by a Father Vincent Travers that explains it well. He says we shouldn't give anybody else the power over how we feel. And that's what you do when you allow criticism to bite into you. I'm not about to hand over the power of my well-being to cynics because they shouldn't have that power. Therefore I'm not allowing them to. I'll continue to do what I believe to be right and if people have a difficulty with that, then that's their problem, not mine."

So, as he has no beef with criticism, let's put some to him. First, his Sean Boylan Syndrome; a lovely, Christian man, whose team sometimes engages in not-so lovely, notso-Christian acts. How does he reconcile this?

"Well, I don't like to see it [unsporting acts from his players]. I think the players would know it's never advocated. At the same time I can't publicly condemn or criticise players. But I would talk to them on the quiet about it."

Okay, criticism number two:

Tyrone's injury list. Before last month's first round game against Fermanagh, RTE's Dara O Cinneide suggested it was a symptom of an excessive and improper training regime. Harte flatly rejects the charge. You only need to look at the variety of injuries.

This isn't Newcastle United, where virtually every injury was a leg one.

O Cinneide, in a way, has a point though. Back in 1972 a sport psychologist called Steiner came up with a very simple equation about team sport. Actual productivity = potential productivity . . . faulty process. In other words, if a team fails to fulfil its potential, it's a systems failure. What faulty process is in work in Tyrone?

Harte thinks there might be one . . . the culture of the club scene. For years he's released his players to participate in it, believing nothing brings them on like games. But now he's on the verge of revising that policy. Two weeks ago Niall Gormley had his jaw broken. Sean Cavanagh got a boot in the face playing for the Moy and was lucky he was only bruised. Brian McGuigan wasn't so fortunate. In his first game in nearly a year, he received an elbow to the face as he was kicking the ball and nearly lost sight in one eye.

Even an optimist like Harte is resigned to losing McGuigan for the year. And that annoys Harte. That there's someone out there in Tyrone today who took out one of the sport's true treasures, a treasure who, says Harte, "football is as natural to as breathing".

"Taking football away from Brian McGuigan is like cutting off his two feet, but it would appear it's the thing to do now, to get at the county player. If you want club football to go ahead as we all do, then the club player has a responsibility to appreciate the county player. Not to stand back and let him have a free day but to challenge him with all the ability you have instead of in a sinister way."

Either way, the show goes on, and he still loves the show.

It might be his 17th consecutive season coaching a Tyrone team but his enthusiasm remains undiminished to the point he's already committed to staying on next year. If anything, his intensity has increased. Harte doesn't just have every competitive match videoed and dissected; he has every game in training videoed and dissected. People around him inspire him to. Like the wit and vision of his consiglieri, Tony Donnelly; the courage and example of his captain, Brian Dooher ("He'll have an ice pack on his knee before and after training yet he'll train again the next night as hard as anybody"); the potential and creativity of Raymond Mulgrew. The whole group, he senses, is up for it in a way they never were last year.

"The display against Laois last year reflected that the All Ireland thing didn't matter enough to us. We had players wanting to play for the club at what I felt were inopportune times. And maybe we weren't demanding that bit more from the players and keeping a close enough attention to how they were going about their programmes, because you felt training was going okay.

"There's a different mood in the camp this year. You've got the core group who are looking towards 30 now and they know they've got to deliver the best of themselves now, and there's a new batch of players coming through behind them."

Where it takes them, he does not know. The quest is no longer greatness; it is about being the best they can be.

Before, that automatically translated as greatness, but the landscape has changed, and sometimes, he feels, people don't appreciate that. It's not so much the retirement of Peter Canavan, but McGuigan.

They haven't been the same team since he broke his leg 13 months ago. And yetf "Against Fermanagh we didn't have Brian McGuigan, we didn't have Stephen O'Neill, we didn't have Enda McGinley for starting, we didn't have Owen Mulligan for starting, Raymond Mulgrew for starting, Martin Penrose for starting. Ask any other team to take six such players out of their attack and go and play a Division One team people continuously underestimate and I think it was great credit to us that we got through that match. Now Enda is available, Mugsy is available, Raymond Mulgrew is available; Martin Penrose is back again. We have options at this stage."

His eyes glint. Forever the optimist. Some things in Ballygawley never change.

HARTE ON. . .

THE TYRONE CLUB SCENE "We have to live with accidental injury but we shouldn't have to live with deliberate injury and there seems to have been a degree of that of late. It would appear that it's the thing to do now, to get at the county player."

TYRONE LAST YEAR AND THIS YEAR
"Last year guys were nearly unhappy to be on the Tyrone panel because their pull was to the club. In 2005 the club was Tyrone. In 2006, it wasn't and it showed against Laois. There's a different atmosphere this year than there was last year."

TYRONE AFTER PETER CANAVAN
At this point in time no one can answer if enough lads can or will step up. There's huge quality there. I think people who want to annoy us say that we can't win without Peter. A talent like that is always going to be missed but life moves on. This mentality of looking for another Canavan or hanging onto him until he can't walk is ridiculous. We're creating a new scene here. It isn't going to be the Peter Canavan Tyrone team, it isn't going to be the anybody Tyrone team. It's going to be a team."